B1 L4 - Language and cognition

sentential markers

english verbs indicate tense; Turkish verbs are evidence type, indicate how you got that info as well

vocabulary differences

color terms (light and dark vs many terms), motion verbs (manner verbs path verbs)

universal view on “Can language specific characteristics shape our mental representations?”

no, all humans have similar mental representations; languages differ in the wya they map the same thoughts into words

linguistic relativity view on “Can language specific characteristics shape our mental representations?”

maybe, language may influence our mental representations at least in some circumstances

How do we know if language-specific characteristics shape our mental representations?

we can’t directly see mental representations, we can compare the performance of speakers of diff languages in tasks specifically designed to elicit an influence of language on non-linguistic tasks (whorfian effects)

color vocabulary example

test speakers with few vs many color names and see whether they differ in ability to distinguish colors

Munsell color system

3D system defined by values in hue, saturation and lightness; independent of language

English vs Berinmo

results show that color names help us to discriminate colors in memory

can we infer that color names typically alter our ability to discriminate colors (ie whether the effect generalizes to other situations?)

possible that a shorter retention period would show no difference across languages, people use color names as memory aid for later discrimination test

reaction time and rapid responses in Russian and English - Winawer et al

English and Russian has words for darker and lighter versions of colors, people agree where boundaries for shades of colors are; Russian speakers faster at categorizing across a boundary than English speakers when chips were from diff Russian categories

Manipulating which brain hemisphere receives visual info first - Gilbert et al

LH is where words are stored, helps to distinguish color chips faster; indicates that color words don’t permanently alter perception

we see an influence of language on some perception tasks…

when color words are quickly activated in the LH, when people can rely on words to perform a memory or discrimination task → consistent with linguistic relativity or whorfian hypothesis

Do Spanish/Greek speakers attend less to manners of motion because their words do not indicate how a person is moving?

Greek speakers look more to path/goal (less to manner) - the snowman the man is skating towards - compared to English speakers but no language diff while simply viewing

attention allocation depends on the task: observation vs description

describing elicits language-specific pattern of looks, simple observation doesn’t seem to involve linguistic meaning unlike color names but language might be used to memorize events

conclusions of all studies

language may influence some cognitive representations depending on task and stimulus types (colors vs events), consistent with language relativity view